Feminist Perspectives on Globalization

First published Tue May 6, 2014

In its broadest sense, globalization refers to the economic, social,
cultural, and political processes of integration that result from the
expansion of transnational economic production, migration,
communications, and technologies. Although both Western and
non-Western feminists working in various areas of philosophy, including
ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, epistemology, and
aesthetics, have made important contributions to debates about
globalization, this entry focuses on one subset of these
critiques. Below, we outline the ways in which predominantly
Western feminist political philosophers who explicitly discuss
globalization have articulated and addressed the challenges associated
with its economic and political dimensions.

Economic globalization refers to the processes of global economic
integration that emerged in the late 20th century, fueled by
neoliberal ideals. Rooted in classical liberal economic thought,
neoliberalism claims that a largely unregulated capitalist economy
embodies the ideal of free individual choice and maximizes economic
efficiency and growth, technological progress, and distributive
justice. Economic globalization is associated with particular
global political and economic institutions, such as the World Trade
Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and
specific neoliberal economic policies, such as the following:

Trade liberalization. Free trade policies, such as the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), seek to integrate regional
or global markets by reducing trade barriers among nations.
Signatory countries typically agree to eliminate tariffs, such as
duties and surcharges, as well as nontariff obstacles to trade, such as
licensing regulations, quotas on imports, and subsidies to domestic
producers.

Deregulation. Trade liberalization is associated with the
easing of restrictions on capital flow and investment, along with the
elimination of government regulations that can be seen as unfair
barriers to trade, including legal protections for workers, consumers,
and the environment.

Privatization of public assets. Economic globalization is
marked by the sale of state-owned enterprises, goods, and services to
private investors in the name of expanding markets and increasing
efficiency. Such assets include banks, key industries, highways and
railroads, power and electricity, education, and healthcare.
Privatization often also involves the sale of publicly owned,
economically exploitable natural resources, such as water, minerals,
forests, and land, to private investors.

Elimination of social welfare programs. Neoliberalism
favors sharp reductions in public expenditures for social services,
such as housing, health care, education, and disability and
unemployment insurance, as a crucial means of reducing the role of
government and making private businesses more efficient. Structural
Adjustment Policies (SAPs) have been instrumental in requiring
countries in the global South to eliminate social welfare
spending. Since the early 1980s, the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund have required debtor nations to adopt SAPs as a
condition of borrowing money or improving conditions of existing
loans. SAPs require debtor nations to restructure their economies
along neoliberal lines, by, for example, removing government
regulation, eliminating social welfare programs, and promoting market
competition.

Restrictions on immigration. While many countries have
liberalized capital markets and eased barriers to transnational trade
in goods and services under globalization, most have not eliminated
barriers to the flow of labor. Indeed, some affluent countries,
such as the United States, have implemented more restrictive
immigration policies, leading to the detention and deportation of
thousands of undocumented immigrants and the militarization of national
borders. Despite these restrictions, however, migration has
increased along with other processes of globalization.

Political philosophers are concerned with the effects of these
policies on human well-being. Proponents of globalization claim
that economic liberalization has enabled many people throughout the
world to move out of conditions of dire poverty. Open markets,
they argue, have increased employment and productivity within
developing countries, raising the standard of living and enhancing the
well-being of the people living within them (Diamandis and Kotler 2012,
Friedman 2012, Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2000, O'Neil
2013). Critics point out that neoliberal policies have created
the widest gap between the very rich and very poor in history, with
unprecedented wealth for the rich and poverty and destitution for
millions of the global poor (Nikiforuk 2007, Pogge 2002). On the
whole, they argue, globalization has benefitted the world's
wealthiest people—both citizens of the global North and the elite in
developing countries—without substantially benefitting the
majority of the world's population.

Feminist philosophers insist that economic globalization must also
be understood in terms of the effects it has had on women, who make up
a disproportionate percentage of the global poor. Most agree that
these effects have been primarily negative. For instance, Jaggar
argues that globalization has promised many things that are crucial to
feminists: peace, prosperity, social justice, environmental
protection, the elimination of racism and ethnocentrism, and, of
course, an increase in the status of women. However, neoliberal
policies have brought about the opposite of these aspirations. Rather
than peace, they have created conditions for war and increased
militarism; rather than prosperity and social justice, they have
increased the gulf between the rich and the poor; rather than
environmental protection, they have led to the privatization and
destruction of publicly-owned natural resources; and rather than
eliminating racist, ethnocentric, and sexist barriers, globalization
has been, ultimately, “a system hostile or antagonistic to
women” (Jaggar 2001, 301).

Although political and economic globalization are interconnected and
mutually reinforcing, they differ in significant ways. Political
globalization refers to changes in the exercise of political power that
have resulted from increased transnational engagement. Prior to
World War II, the international political system was understood in
terms of the so-called Westphalian model. According to this
model, political power is exercised primarily through governance at the
level of the territorial state. The international political
system is comprised of sovereign states, which enjoy a monopoly on
political power within their own territories. International treaties
govern relations among states; however, states generally cannot
legitimately intervene in the domestic affairs of other nations.
Thus, when problems, such as famines, genocides, and civil wars arise,
they are seen primarily as security issues for individual states, not
matters of justice affecting the global community (Fraser 2013).

In contrast to this state-centric model, political globalization
must be understood as polycentric, that is, as involving
non-state institutions that exercise political power from both
“above” and “below” the state (So 2010). The
development of supra-national institutions, such as the United Nations,
the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the
European Union, NATO, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and
others, can be understood as political “globalization from
above.” These institutions create international rules that
constrain the sovereignty of states, in some cases, through enforcement
mechanisms that penalize for noncompliance. In addition to holding
states accountable for adhering to mutually agreed upon norms and
standards, global institutions often set the agendas that determine
which issues receive international attention. Institutions such at the
UN and EU have sought to draw attention to some of the injustices
experienced by women around the world, such as sexual violence, lack of
educational access, and other women's human rights violations,
and to develop global frameworks for addressing them. However,
many feminist philosophers argue that supra-national institutions have
had limited success in protecting the world's most vulnerable
people. Most global institutions privilege Western and corporate
interests over those of vulnerable and marginalized people, and few
have been successful in challenging the structural inequalities that
give rise to gendered harms, such as deprivation, discrimination, and
violence.

For many feminists, the transnational political movements that have
emerged “from below” the state offer a more promising
dimension of political globalization. The expansion of global
communications has led to the development of new transnational
political networks, comprised of individuals, non-governmental
organizations, and social movements. These transnational networks,
sometimes referred to as “global civil society,” connect
millions of people around the world based on shared political
commitments. Consequently, some feminist philosophers believe
that political “globalization from below” provides women
and other vulnerable people with an effective means for resisting the
inequalities created by economic globalization. For instance,
some feminists argue that globalization has created new transnational
public spheres in which political opinion can be marshaled to hold
leaders democratically accountable (Fraser 2009, Gould 2009).
Others see the promise of political globalization in transnational
feminist solidarity movements, such as the women's rights are
human rights campaign and groups combating sex trafficking and global
care chains, that enable feminist resistance to dominant political and
economic forces (Copelon 2003, Hochschild 2000, 2002, Kittay, 2008,
2009, Parekh 2009, Robinson 2003, Stamatopoulou 1995, Walby 2002, Weir
2005).

Given the complexity of globalization, how have feminist political
philosophers addressed the social, political, and economic challenges
posed by it? Below, we provide an overview of several feminist
theoretical approaches to this task.

‘Feminist theoretical approaches to globalization’ is an
umbrella term that refers to a number of specific theoretical
approaches that feminists have used to articulate the challenges that
globalization poses for women, people of color, and the global
poor. These various approaches include those developed by
postcolonial feminists, transnational feminists, and feminists who
endorse an ethics of care. In this section, we identify four key
features shared by these various feminist approaches to globalization
and outline some of the distinctive characteristics of each theoretical
orientation.

First, feminist approaches to globalization seek to provide
frameworks for understanding the gender injustices associated with
globalization. Rather than developing all-encompassing ideal theories
of global justice, however, feminist philosophers tend to adopt the
non-ideal theoretical perspectives, which focus on specific, concrete
issues. Early feminist analyses focused on issues that were widely
believed to be of particular importance to women around the world, such
as domestic violence, workplace discrimination, and human rights
violations against women. While gendered analyses of these issues
have provided valuable insights into the distinctive nature of the
harms involved, many feminist philosophers view this approach as too
narrow, both in terms of the specific issues it addresses and its
methodological approach to these issues. They contend that even
apparently gender-neutral global issues often have a gendered
dimension, including war, global governance, migration, southern debt,
and climate change. Moreover, by addressing specific global
“women's issues” as independent phenomena, early
feminist analyses failed to take into account the systematic and
structural gendered injustices associated with neoliberalism.
Although gender oppression takes different forms in different social,
cultural, and geographical locations, women in every society face
systematic disadvantages, such as those resulting from their socially
assigned responsibility for domestic work. Because of these
structural injustices, women of all nationalities tend to suffer more
from the poverty, overwork, deprivation, and political marginalization
associated with neoliberal policies. Thus, more recent feminist
analyses of globalization tend to understand the outcomes of
globalization not as disparate or contingent phenomena, but rather as a
result of systematic, structural injustices on a global scale.
Indeed, some contend that the global basic structure itself is
implicitly biased against women (Jaggar 2009a).

The second key feature of feminist approaches to globalization is a
shared commitment to core feminist values, including an opposition to
the subordination of women. Some theorists also draw upon
feminist interpretations of mainstream moral and political ideals, such
as equality, democracy, and human rights, to develop critiques of
neoliberal policies. For instance, Jaggar appeals to liberal democratic
norms to argue that many southern debt obligations are not morally
binding because their citizenries were “largely uninformed and/or
their options were virtually non-existent” when they undertook
these supposed debts (Jaggar 2002a, 433). Many feminists also use
the language of human rights to address the challenges of
globalization. While they acknowledge that traditional
understandings of human rights are implicitly male-biased, they contend
that feminist rearticulations these norms can help to identify the
gendered harms involved in sexual slavery, forced domestic labor, and
the systematic withholding of education, food, and healthcare from
women and girls that follow from severe economic deprivation (Bunch
2006, Cudd 2005, Jaggar 2002a, Nussbaum 2001, Robinson 2004, Okin 1998,
Reilly 2007). (See Section 3.3 below.)

However, not all feminist political philosophers agree with this
approach. Some believe that new feminist ideals, such as relational
understandings of power, collective responsibility, and mutual
dependence, are needed to diagnose the gender injustices associated
with globalization (Hankivsky 2006, Held 2004, 2007, Kittay 2008, 2009,
Miller 2006, 2011, Robinson 2006, 2010, Weir 2008a, 2008b, Young
2011). For instance, Iris Marion Young argues the traditional
ideal theories of justice are unable to account for the unjust
background conditions that contribute to the development of sweatshops
in the global South. She argues that a new relational model of
responsibility, which she calls the social connection model, is needed
to articulate the obligations that people in affluent northern
countries have to workers in the global South. The social
connection model holds that individuals bear responsibility for
structural injustices, such as those suffered by workers on the global
assembly line, because our actions contribute to the institutional
processes that produce such injustices. In particular, northern
consumers have a responsibility to organize collectively to reform the
injustices associated with sweatshop labor (Young 2011).

The third key feature of feminist approaches to globalization is an
emphasis on feminist methodologies. In particular, these
approaches tend to embody three key methodological commitments. The
first is intersectionality, which maintains that systems of oppression
interact to produce injustices, and thus, that gender injustices cannot
be understood solely in terms of sex or gender. Feminists who
theorize about justice on the domestic level argue that women's
experiences of gender oppression are shaped by other forms of
oppression, such as those based on race, class, disability, and sexual
orientation. Feminist theorists of globalization contend that gender
oppression interacts with these systems of oppression, along with other
forms of systematic disadvantage that arise within the global context.
Salient categories include nationality, geographical location,
citizenship status, and socioeconomic position within the global
economy (for instance, as a Southern elite, a Western laborer,
or a worker on the global assembly line). Given this broad conception
of intersectionality, feminist theorists of globalization insist that
gender injustices arise within specific transnational contexts, such as
historical relationships among nations and current global economic
policies.

The second methodological commitment shared by feminist approaches
to globalization is a sensitivity to context and concrete
specificity. Feminist philosophers strive to accurately reflect
the diverse interests, experience, and concerns of women throughout the
world, and to take seriously differences in culture, history, and
socio-economic and political circumstances. In this way, feminist
approaches to globalization attempt to move between local conditions
and global pressures, between historical realities and contemporary
experiences of oppression and vulnerability, while being attentive to
complex interactions among social, economic, and political
forces. This has led some feminist theorists of globalization to
distinguish their views from well-known feminists, such as Martha
Nussbaum and Susan Okin, whom Ackerly and Attanasi refer to as
“international feminists” by virtue of their methodological
commitments. In their view, Nussbaum and Okin do not pay
sufficient attention to the ways that justice and injustice are
mediated by local conditions in their attempts to identify universal
moral ideals. As a result, their theories tend to privilege Western
perspectives and undermine their own commitment to reflecting
women's lived experience (Ackerly and Attanasi 2009).

Finally, feminist theorists of globalization are committed to
developing self-reflexive critiques. At the heart of this
methodology is a willingness to critically examine feminist claims,
with particular attention to the ways in which feminist discourses
privilege certain points of view. For instance, Schutte insists
that ostensibly universal feminist values and ideas are likely to
embody the values of dominant cultures. This helps to explain why
the voices of women from developing countries are often taken seriously
only if they reflect the norms and values of the West and conform to
Western expectations. Thus, Schutte insists that feminists must
engage in methodological practices that de-center their habitual
standpoints and foreground perspectives that challenge accepted ways of
thinking (Schutte 2002).

The struggle to develop feminist theories that embody these
methodological commitments has been ongoing for feminists. In the
1980s, Chandra Talpade Mohanty observed that Western feminist
scholarship tends to adopt an ethnocentric perspective, depicting
so-called Third-World women as one-dimensional, non-agentic, and
homogenous. In her often-cited words, such scholarship tends to
suggest that:

the average Third World woman leads an essentially truncated life
based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being
“Third World” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated,
tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.).
This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation
of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their
own bodies and sexualities and the freedom to make their own decisions
(Mohanty 2003, 22).

Mohanty claims that this perspective leads to a simplistic
understanding of what feminists in Western countries can do to
“help” women in developing nations. Many of the
recent developments in the feminist literature on globalization can be
understood as a response to this theoretical failure. In addition
to recognizing the ways in which power influences the production of
feminist theories, feminist critics of globalization strive to
understand the ways in which Western women share responsibility for
gender injustices in developing countries and at home, and to
articulate their obligations to eliminate these injustices.

Despite these common aims and methodological commitments, feminists
have analyzed globalization from a number of different
theoretical perspectives. Below, we examine three prominent approaches
to globalization, developed by postcolonial, transnational, and ethics
of care feminists. Although it is not possible to draw sharp
boundaries around these theoretical perspectives, we identify some
distinctive features of each.

2.2.1 Postcolonial and Third-World Feminisms

Postcolonial and Third-World feminisms offer primarily critical
theoretical frameworks, which analyze globalization within the context
of the history of Western colonialism and imperialism. They begin
with the claim that Western colonialism and imperialism have played
important roles in shaping the contemporary world, and highlight their
enduring effects on global relations and local cultural
practices. Although postcolonial and Third-World feminists
write from all over the world, they foreground non-Western epistemic
standpoints and criticize North-South power asymmetries from the
diverse perspectives of members of the global South (Herr 2013, Schutte
2002, 2005).

Postcolonial and Third-World feminists make several important
claims. First, they insist that it is impossible to understand
local practices in developing countries without acknowledging the ways
in which these practices have been shaped by their economic and
historical contexts, particularly their connection to Western
colonialism and imperialism.

Moreover, they warn that attempts to explain the suffering of women
in developing countries in simplistic terms often tend to reproduce a
“colonial stance” toward the global South. For
instance, as we explained above, some Third World feminists, such as
Chandra Mohanty, see elements of imperialism in Western feminist
scholarship on women in the global south. Similarly, postcolonial
feminists, such as Uma Narayan, criticize feminists for unwittingly
adopting a Eurocentric perspective. For instance, some Western
feminist scholars, such as Mary Daly, strongly criticize cultural
practices, such as sati, the Indian practice of widow immolation, as
self-evidently wrong. However, Narayan argues that approaching
sati as an isolated, local phenomenon fundamentally misrepresents
it. Understanding sati in the context of colonial history
provides a richer analysis of this practice, since it gained its
symbolic power during British rule as an emblem of Hindu and Indian
culture (Narayan 1997). Highlighting the role that colonialism has
played in shaping local practices enables feminists to avoid adopting a
Eurocentric perspective. Likewise, postcolonial and Third-world
feminists insist that any feminist analysis of the harms of
globalization must take seriously the history and ongoing cultural, economic, and
political effects of colonialism and imperialism.

Postcolonial feminists further argue that although colonialism has
formally ended, many aspects of globalization are best understood as
neo-colonial practices. As Sally Scholz explains:

Multinational corporations and global businesses, largely centered
in Western nations, bring their own colonizing influence through
business models, hegemonic culture, exploitation of workers, and
displacement of traditional trades. Whereas traditional forms of
colonialism entailed the colonizer assuming the privilege of ruling the
colony, this neocolonialism rules indirectly through the power it
creates and enjoys by bringing manufacturing jobs to an area or
providing consumer goods to a people – often Western inspired
consumer goods as well. Old style colonialism often killed
or displaced indigenous peoples; the new style of colonialism
impoverishes a culture by swamping society with Western values,
products or ideals (2010, 139).

More broadly, postcolonial and Third World feminists observe that
many of the conditions created by colonialism—economic inequality
and exploitation, racism, cultural marginalization, and the domination
of the global South by the global North—have been sustained and
intensified by neoliberalism. Moreover, they argue, neoliberal policies
and institutions systematically favor countries in the global North to
the detriment of southern nations. International trade policies serve
Western interests even while claiming to be politically neutral and
fair. Global economic institutions also privilege Western culture and
political norms, presenting them as models for the rest of the world,
while ignoring and marginalizing the claims of women's and
indigenous movements in the global South (Weendon 2002).

2.2.2 Ethics of Care

Another prominent school of feminist theoretical responses to globalization
puts care, both caring labor—the work of caring for the young,
old, sick, and disabled, and the everyday maintenance of
households—and the moral ideal of care, at the center of its
analyses. Proponents of this approach begin by observing that
most mainstream analyses of globalization either ignore or devalue
care. This is problematic, they argue, for at least two reasons:
care work, which is done almost exclusively by women, has been
profoundly influenced by globalization; and any viable alternative to
neoliberal globalization must prioritize the moral ideal of care.
Thus, ethics of care approaches to globalization have both practical
and theoretical dimensions.

Theoretically, ethics of care feminists aim to provide a systematic
critique of neoliberal assumptions and develop moral ideals capable of
guiding more just forms of globalization. In their view, neoliberalism
presupposes a problematic notion of the self, which posits individuals
as atomistic, independent, and self-interested, and an inaccurate
social ontology, which suggests that human relationships are formed by
choice rather than necessity or dependency. These assumptions lead
neoliberalism to prioritize economic growth, efficiency, and profit
making over other values, such as equality, human rights, and
care. Ethics of care feminists reject these assumptions. In their
view, human beings are fundamentally relational and interdependent;
individuals are defined, indeed constituted, by their caring
relationships. All persons experience long periods during which their
lives literally depend on the care of others, and everyone needs some
degree of care in order flourish. Thus, vulnerability, dependency, and
need should be understood not as deficits or limitations, but rather
as essential human qualities requiring an adequate political
response.

Ethics of care feminists contend that relational values, including
care, should form the basis of more just forms of globalization. In
Hankivsky's view, a global ethics of care begins with three
assumptions: “1) care is considered to be a fundamental aspect of
all human life; 2) all human beings are interdependent by virtue of
being part of ongoing relations of care; and 3) ‘people are
entitled to care because they are part of ongoing relations of
care’” (9). Because a global care ethics begins with
a relational ontology, it requires global political leaders to develop
social and economic policies that aim to meet human needs and reduce
suffering rather than to expand markets and increase economic
competition (Hankivsky 2006). Held endorses a similar view.
According to her, an ethic of care requires leaders to foster a global
economy that is capable of meeting universal human needs (Held 2004,
2007). Similarly, Miller advocates a “global duty to
care,” which requires individuals to take responsibility for
their role in contributing to global oppression, and obligates leaders
to advocate for institutions that embody the moral value of care
(Miller 2006).

Concretely, feminist theorists who favor an ethics of care approach
highlight the role of care work in the global economy and put forth
recommendations for reevaluating it. For example, Robinson develops a
relational moral ontology that sheds lights on the features of
globalization that are usually invisible: the global distribution of
care work and the corresponding patterns of gender and racial
inequality; the under-provision of public resources for care work in
both developed and developing countries; and the ways in which unpaid
or low-paid care work sustains cycles of exploitation and inequality on
a global scale (Robinson 2006). Similarly, Held advocates for increased
state support of various forms of care work and for policies designed
to meet people's needs in caring ways (Held 2004, 2007).

2.2.3 Transnational Feminism

In its broadest sense, transnational feminism maintains that
globalization has created the conditions for feminist solidarity across
national borders. On the one hand, globalization has enabled
transnational processes that generate injustices for women in multiple
geographical locations, such the global assembly line (discussed
below). Yet on the other, the technologies associated with
globalization have created new political spaces that enable feminist
political resistance. Thus, transnational feminists incorporate
the critical insights of postcolonial, Third World and ethics of care
feminists into a positive vision of transnational feminist
solidarity.

Transnational feminism is sometimes contrasted with global or
international feminism, a second-wave theory that emphasizes solidarity
among women across national boundaries based on their common experience
of patriarchal oppression. However, transnational feminism
differs from global feminism in at least three significant
respects.

First, transnational feminism is sensitive to differences among
women. Global feminists argue that patriarchy is universal; women
across the globe have a common experience of gender oppression.
They promote the recognition of a “global sisterhood” based
on these shared experiences, which transcends differences in race,
class, sexuality, and national boundaries. This solidarity is
thought to provide a unified front against global patriarchy.
Transnational feminists also advocate for solidarity across national
boundaries. However, their approach emphasizes the methodological
commitments discussed above, specifically intersectionality,
sensitivity to concrete specificity, and self-reflexivity.
Transnational feminists are careful to point out that although
globalizing processes affect everyone, they affect different women very
differently, based on their geographical and social locations.
They are also quick to acknowledge that many aspects of globalization
may benefit some women while unduly burdening many others.

Second, transnational feminist solidarity is political in
nature. Whereas global feminists advocate a form of social
solidarity defined on the basis of characteristics shared by all women,
such as a common gender identity or experience of patriarchal
oppression, transnational feminist solidarity is grounded in the
political commitments of individuals, such as the commitment to
challenge injustice or oppression. Because transnational feminist
solidarity is based on shared political commitments rather than a
common identity or set of experiences, advantaged individuals,
including those who have benefited from injustice, can join in
solidarity with those who have experienced injustice or oppression
directly (Ferguson 2009, Scholz 2008).

Third, transnational feminists focus on specific
globalizing processes, such as the growth of offshore manufacturing,
rather than a theorized global patriarchy, and often take existing
transnational feminist collectives as a model for their theoretical
accounts of solidarity. For instance, Ann Ferguson argues that
anti-globalization networks, such as worker-owned cooperatives, labor
unions, fair trade organizations, and land reform movements, are
creating the conditions for North-South women's coalition
movements based on non-essentialist political commitments to global
gender justice (Ferguson, 2009; see also Kang 2008, Mendoza, 2002,
Vargas, 2003).

In addition to analyzing the gendered dimensions of globalization,
feminist political philosophers discuss specific issues that have been
shaped by it. Below, we discuss four representative examples. First, we
discuss two issues associated with economic
globalization—economic justice and migration—and then we
turn to two issues connected to political globalization—human rights
and global governance.

It is widely argued that neoliberal policies have created dramatic
economic inequalities, both between the global North and global South
and within countries in both hemispheres. One task for feminist
political philosophers has been to identify the ways in which these
policies reinforce specific inequalities based on gender, class, race,
and nationality. In particular, feminists shed light on the
disparate and often disproportionately burdensome consequences of
neoliberal policies for specific groups of women. An additional,
related task has been to identify the ways in which gendered practices
and ideologies shape the processes of globalization.

Free trade policies feature prominently in such feminist critiques.
Trade liberalization has led to the wide-scale movement of once
well-paying manufacturing jobs in the global North to low wage, export
processing or free trade zones in the global South. In the global
North, the pressure on companies to “outsource” jobs to
countries where labor is cheaper and working conditions are less
regulated has meant that many of the workers who once relied on
well-paying manufacturing jobs are now unable to make a living.
These jobs have largely been replaced by contingent and part-time
service-sector jobs, which tend to be poorly paid and lack health and
retirement benefits. The corresponding reduction in real wages
has had a disproportionate effect on women, and especially women of
color, who hold a higher share of service-sector jobs (Jaggar 2001,
2002a).

In the global South, foreign-owned manufacturing and assembly
production facilities have proliferated in free trade zones, forming
what is often referred to as the “global assembly line.”
Historically, foreign-dominated industrial expansion has meant more
jobs for men; however, it is primarily women who comprise the new,
“international, industrial proletariat” working on the
global assembly line. Gendered and racial stereotypes have played
an important role in the establishing this gendered division of
labor. In particular, employers tend to perceive women,
particularly Asian women, as “tractable, hard-working,
dexterous—and sexy” (Jaggar 2001, 305). Governments
have been quick to capitalize on these perceptions in their efforts to
recruit foreign investment.

Proponents of globalization argue that the expansion of export
processing has had positive consequences for women, providing jobs for
thousands of otherwise unemployed women and offering new forms of
agency. However, feminist political philosophers argue that jobs
on the global assembly line tend to be difficult, insecure, and
dangerous: working conditions are poor, hours are long, wages are low,
and sexual harassment is widespread (Young 2007, 164–67). Thus,
they contend, the results for women are contradictory at best. As
Jaggar argues, while women's increased economic power may provide
them with some freedom within their families, they are also
“super-exploited by foreign corporations with the collusion of
their own governments. As employees, they often experience a type
of labor control that is almost feudal in its requirement of
subservience and dependence” (Jaggar 2001, 306).

Trade liberalization policies have also allowed affluent, northern
countries to sell heavily subsidized agricultural products in southern
markets, leading to the decline of small-scale and subsistence
farming. Many of the female farmers who have been pushed off
their land have sought employment in export-processing zones or as
seasonal laborers, at lower wages than their male counterparts.
Others have found poorly paid and often dangerous jobs in the informal
economy (Jaggar 2001, 2002a).

Feminist political philosophers are also concerned with the gendered
effects of structural adjustment policies (SAPs), which many poor
countries have been forced to undertake as conditions of borrowing
money or rescheduling their existing debts. The resulting
reductions in publicly-funded health services, education, and childcare
undermine the health and well-being of everyone they affect.
However, the burdens of SAPs are disproportionately borne by
women. Cuts in public health services have contributed to a rise
in maternal mortality. The introduction of school fees has made
education unavailable to poorer children, especially to girls, leading
to higher school dropout rates for girls in many southern countries
(Kittay 2008). Cuts to other publicly funded social services also
disproportionately harm women, whose care-giving responsibilities make
them more reliant on these programs.

More broadly, SAPs have contributed to increases in poverty and
unemployment in developing countries, placing additional burdens on
women within both the household and the public sphere. In times
of economic difficulty, men tend to maintain their expenditures, while
women are expected to make ends meet with fewer resources.
Consequently, women have had to develop survival strategies for their
families, often picking up the caregiving labor that is no longer
provided by the state. Women also face intensified pressure to
earn income outside the home. Some women who have been unable to
find adequate employment in their own countries have turned to labor
migration, which we discuss below. Sex work, including child
prostitution, has also increased under these conditions (Schutte
2002).

Migration has accelerated along with the globalization of the
economy and women comprise a higher proportion of migrants, especially
labor migrants, than ever before. Feminist philosophical
responses to the feminization of migration fall into two general lines
of argument. Early work in this area highlights the ways in which
gender, race, class, culture, and immigration status intersect to
produce disproportionate burdens for immigrant women. Later work
discusses the feminization of labor migration, with a focus on domestic
workers.

Early work by feminist philosophers typically argues that in sexist,
racist, and class-divided societies, such as the United States,
formally gender-neutral immigration policies often work to the
detriment of immigrant women (Narayan 1995, Wilcox 2005). For instance,
Uma Narayan argues that U.S. immigration legislation, such as
the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment (IMFA) heightens
immigrant women's vulnerability to domestic violence.
Before the IMFA was adopted, when a citizen or legal permanent
resident married a foreigner and petitioned for permanent
residency status for his spouse, legal residency was granted
fairly quickly. The IMFA changed this process,
adding a two-year period of “conditional
residency,” during which the couple must remain married, and
requiring both spouses to petition for adjustment to
permanent residency status at the end of this waiting
period. Narayan argues that the IMFA increases the already
significant barriers to escaping abusive marriages
for immigrant women because it ties immigration status to
marriage. This is especially problematic because immigrant women are
generally “economically, psychologically, and
linguistically dependent on their spouses” (Narayan 1995,
106).

More recent approaches to the feminization of global migration focus
on what Arlie Hochschild refers to as “global care chains”
(Hochschild 2000, 2002) These chains, which link women across the
world, are established through the transnational exchange of domestic
services. Global care chains typically begin when relatively
well-off northern or Western women enter the paid labor force and hire
other women, usually poorer women from developing countries, to care
for their children and other dependents. Migrant careworkers often must
leave their own children behind in their home countries to be cared for
by even poorer careworkers or family members who may already have
care-giving responsibilities or be engaged with paid labor. Many
factors have contributed to the production of global care chains.
In wealthy countries, the entry of women into the paid workforce,
without corresponding increases in public provisions for childcare or
the redistribution of caring responsibilities between genders, has
created a high demand for paid domestic labor. In poor countries,
the supply of domestic labor has been stimulated by a scarcity of
well-paying jobs and in many cases, a growing reliance on
remittances. Cuts in public services in southern countries have
also encouraged women to migrate as a means for earning the income they
need to pay for private services for their children, such as healthcare
and education (Kittay, 2008, 2009).

Global care chains raise difficult issues for feminists, over and
above those raised by the background injustices that help to generate
them. In particular, some northern women are able to take
advantage of increased opportunities in the paid workforce only because
southern women take up their socially-assigned domestic work, leaving
their own families in the care of others. Global care chains also
contribute to a larger, neo-colonial process – a “global
care drain,” in which care is systematically extracted from
people in poor countries and transferred to individuals in affluent
nations (Hochschild 2002).

Feminist analyses of care chains typically argue that traditional
theories of justice have difficulty articulating the precise nature of
the harms or injustices involved in these phenomena. Most
theories of global justice focus on unjust distributions of benefits
and burdens among nations; however, it is not clear that care should be
understood as a distributive good. Other features of care chains
also resist traditional ethical evaluation. Careworkers are not
overtly coerced to migrate, and each party in the global care chain
appears to benefit from her participation: women who employ migrant
caregivers are able to pursue opportunities in the public sphere;
migrant caregivers are able to send money home; and their children and
sending nations benefit economically from these remittances.
Migrant caregivers clearly are vulnerable to exploitation and workplace
abuses, and they and their children suffer from their long
absences. However, it could be argued that each of these harms is
counterbalanced by significant gains (Kittay, 2008, 2009).

Some feminists argue that a feminist ethics of care is better suited
to theorizing global care chains. In particular, care ethics
emphasizes several key normative features and practices that
traditional theories tend to overlook: concrete specificity;
acknowledgement of human dependence and vulnerability; and a relational
understanding of the self (Kittay, 2008). Care ethics focuses on
the ethical significance of relationships formed through dependency,
such as those between caregivers and their charges. Kittay argues
that intimate relationships between specific individuals, in which
caring and affection are the norm, play a vital role in forming and
sustaining individuals' self-identities. When these
relationships are disrupted, people suffer harm to their sense of self
and self-respect. It follows that the harm involved in global
care chains lies in their threat to the core relationships that are
constitutive of self-identity.

To protect dependents and caregivers from the harms that flow from
fractured relationships, Kittay believes the right to give and receive
care should be recognized as a basic human right. Weir agrees
that dismantling global care chains requires recognizing care as
“an intrinsic good, a source of identity and meaning, which
should be recognized as a human right” (Weir 2005, 313).
However, both also suggest that the recognition of a properly
formulated right to care would not eliminate global care chains on its
own. Care chains will persist until care, whether provided by
professionals or within family networks, is socially recognized and
economically supported. Caregiving responsibilities should also
be more fairly distributed between genders and paid work should be
organized with the recognition that all workers—male and female,
rich and poor—are responsible for providing care. Unlocking
care chains will also require mitigating the unjust background
conditions that force women to choose between providing financial
support for their families and being with and providing face to face
care for them. To begin, immigration policies must include
specific provisions that make it easier for careworkers to bring their
children or return home on a regular basis. Ultimately, however,
eliminating care chains will require restructuring the global economy
so that no one is forced to leave her home country to find decent
working and living conditions.

The term ‘human rights’ refers simultaneously to several
things: a moral language; a set of norms and laws, both national and
international; and a framework for analyzing and responding to the
various serious harms experienced by men and women around the world.
Feminist political philosophers argue that globalization has had
contradictory effects on the extent to which women experience human
rights violations.

Many feminist political philosophers have argued that globalization
has contributed to human rights violations against women. Most
obviously, neoliberal policies have led to infringements of specific
social and economic rights, such as the right “to a standard of
living adequate for the health and well-being” and the right
“to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability,
widowhood, and old age” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
article 25). Moreover, by diminishing women's economic
security, neoliberal policies have exacerbated existing forms of gender
discrimination and violence and made women and girls more vulnerable to
a wide variety of additional human rights violations. Three examples
are prominent in the literature. First, the economic insecurity and
concomitant increase in poverty associated with globalization have made
girls more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In particular,
girls are more likely to be sold as child brides or pushed into
prostitution or sexual slavery in order to support their families (Okin
1998, 45). Second, when resources are scarce, women and girls are less
likely to receive food than boys and men and are less likely to attend
school. Finally, Shiva argues that neoliberal globalization has made
women more vulnerable to sexual violence. She notes the extraordinary
increase in rape in India: 800 percent since the 1970s and an
additional 250 percent since the economy was liberalized (Morgan 2013).
Although the reasons for this rise are complex, Shiva believes they are
connected to several aspects of globalization: structural adjustment
policies, which eliminated major sectors of women's economic
activity; the destruction of the natural environment, which displaced
many women; and the exclusion of women from economic and political
decision-making.

More positively, some feminist philosophers contend that
globalization has enabled women to claim their human rights by
creating “new spaces, institutions and rhetoric where the notion
of universal human rights is a powerful justificatory principle”
(Walby 2002, 534). Others credit globalization for the emergence of
new international non-governmental organizations and feminist social
movements, which have strengthened the worldwide movement for women's
human rights (Robinson 2003, 161). The “women's rights are human
rights” movement has used the language of human rights to
criticize many assaults on women's dignity that were previously
considered to be natural or inevitable. For instance, the movement has
shown that abuses in the private sphere, such as domestic violence,
so-called “honor killings,” and violence done in the name
of culture or tradition, are legitimate human rights violations. The
movement also helped to codify women's human rights in formal United
Nations documents, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence Against Women, which activist groups have
subsequently used to challenge domestic laws and norms (Stamatopoulou
1995).

Women's human rights movements have also had an impact on
international understandings of the gendered consequences of war and
militarization. In UN forums and other global venues, feminists have
challenged international human rights laws concerning rape and sexual
violence in war. As Copelon explained in 2003, “[l]ess than a
decade ago, it was openly questioned whether rape was a war crime.
Human rights and humanitarian organizations largely ignored sexual
violence and the needs of its victims” (Copelon, 1). However, by
2002, feminists had successfully convinced the authors of the Rome
Statute to include a broad range of sexually violent crimes among the
gravest crimes of war. The document considers rape, forced pregnancy,
sexual assault, and forced prostitution to be “crimes against
humanity” if they are committed as part of a widespread or
systematic attack on civilian populations, in times of war as well as
peace, by non-state actors as well as official state actors. The
Statute's definition of rape goes a long way toward recognizing
rape as a gender-based atrocity on par with other long-recognized
atrocities, such as torture and genocide (Parekh 2009). Arguably, these
changes in international law would not have been possible without
transnational activism, which can clearly be seen as an example of
“globalization from below.”

As with human rights, feminist philosophers have argued that
globalization has contradictory implications for democratic
governance. On the one hand, neoliberalism has diminished
national sovereignty, further excluding women and the poor from
democratic processes (Herr 2003). Yet globalization also connects
people across national borders, creating transnational communities that
offer new avenues for democratic participation.

Globalization has been accompanied by the establishment of formal
democracy in some countries and the number of women serving in national
legislatures has increased in some nations. However, some
feminist philosophers are quick to argue that neoliberalism has not
resulted in increased political influence for women on the whole,
especially at the level of global politics. One important reason
is that global economic institutions are neither adequately
representative nor fully democratic. Women are virtually absent
from the formal decision-making bodies of institutions such as the WTO
and the World Bank, and these institutions tend to be unofficially
dominated by the interests of wealthy nations and multinational
corporations.

Feminists argue that women's lack of political influence at
the global level has not been compensated for by their increased
influence in national politics because globalization has undermined
national sovereignty, especially in poor nations. Structural adjustment
policies require debtor nations to implement specific domestic policies
that disproportionately harm women, such as austerity measures, despite
strong local opposition. Trade rules issued by the World Trade
Organization also supersede the national laws of signatory nations,
including those pertaining to matters of ethics and public policy, such
as environmental protections and health and safety standards for
imported goods, as well as trade tariffs (Jaggar 2001,
2002a).

Nor does women's participation in NGOs or other organizations
within civil society guarantee that their interests will be fairly
represented. Indeed, some feminists charge that foreign-funded
NGOs are “a new form of colonialism because they create
dependence on nonelected overseas funders and their locally appointed
officials, undermining the development of social programs administered
by elected officials accountable to local people” (Jaggar 2001,
309). Even local, women-run NGOs sometimes fail to live up to
their democratic aspirations. NGO projects are often shaped by
the agendas of their corporate funders, to the detriment of the
expressed needs of the women they serve. Demands for
accountability to donors also limit the internal democracy of NGOs by
encouraging the professionalization of grassroots organizations (Jaggar
2001, 2005a).

While feminist philosophers agree that globalization has
concentrated power in the hands of wealthy nations and corporations,
further marginalizing women and the global poor, some believe the
conditions of globalization also enable new forms of democratic
accountability. For instance, Gould argues that participants in
transnational associations have equal rights to participate in
decisions about their common activities. She also suggests that
the Internet and other communication and information technologies, such
open source software and online deliberative forums, can “help to
increase both democratic participation and representation in the
functioning of transnational institutions” (Gould 2009, 38).

Nancy Fraser further suggests that globalization has created new
transnational public spheres in which public opinion can be created and
marshaled to hold political leaders democratically
accountable. Traditional public sphere theory, such as that
developed by Habermas, defines the public sphere as an area of social
life in which individuals come together to reach a common public
opinion about social issues. Insofar as the process of
deliberation is fair and inclusive, the resulting public opinion is
normatively legitimate; because it expresses the considered will of
civil society, it can be mobilized as a political force to hold public
power democratically accountable.

However, Fraser points out that these essential features of
publicity—normative legitimacy and political efficacy—are
not easily associated with new transnational communicative arenas, in
which territorially dispersed interlocutors interact through various
discursive forms. The reason is that traditional public sphere
theory implicitly assumes a Westaphalian political model, in which
co-citizens, with equal rights to participate, create public opinion
addressed to a particular state. Thus, in her words:

[i]t is difficult to associate the notion of legitimate public opinion
with communicative arenas in which the interlocutors are not fellow
members of a political community, with equal rights to participate in
political life. And it is hard to associate the notion of efficacious
communicative power with discursive spaces that do not correlate with
sovereign states (Fraser 2009, 77).

Nevertheless, she argues, we should not jettison the idea of a
transnational public sphere, provided that the notions of normative legitimacy
and political efficacy can be reformulated to apply to communication in
transnational discursive arenas.

On the whole, globalization presents a number of challenges to
feminist political philosophers who seek to develop conceptions of
justice and responsibility capable of responding to the lived realities
of both men and women. As globalization will most certainly continue,
these challenges are likely to increase in the coming decades. As we
have outlined above, feminist political philosophers have already made
great strides towards understanding this complex phenomenon. Yet the
challenge of how to make globalization fairer remains for feminist
philosophers, as well as all others who strive for equality and
justice.

Copelon, R., 2003, “Rape and Gender Violence: From Impunity to
Accountability in International Law,” Human Rights
Dialogue, 2(10), published by the Carnegie Council,
available online
(accessed November 21, 2013).